Yesterday we made our biggest announcement to date, that your yoga studio can now have an app in the app store!

There's so much more thought that went into the decisions about the functionality behind this announcement, other than just the fact that we wanted our customers to be able to have their own presence in the app store, and one item that's worth exploring in particular is payments.

Our decision to release this new set of features is probably related more to payments than anything else.

Sometimes people think I'm exaggerating when I tell them we are different in our DNA than other companies that do what we do, but I don't think I'm exaggerating. Unlike every one of our competitors, we made a conscious decision to avoid making payments a part of our revenue model. The reason we made this decision is because as a company we asked a fundamentally different question than everyone else.

Whereas they ask, "how can we provide credit card transactions at a reasonable rate while generating some revenue for our business?", we asked the question, "how can we set things up so that eventually our customers pay no credit card transaction fees."

That future isn't here yet, but it's coming like a freight train and I for one and extremely happy that when Apple comes out with whatever payment thing it is that they're going to announce, we'll be embracing this technology and helping to bring our customers into the world of this amazing new technology instead of wishing it didn't exist.

We've had an app for studio owners for a while now, and without the context above it might not make sense as to why we did such massive enhancements on the student side of things first. The reason is because the most important innovations on the horizon are going to be worn on your student's bodies or living in their pockets, and so it made sense to start the foundation there.

Between our integration with Stripe that allows you to store student credit cards, our student iPhone app options that allow your students to make purchases with the touch of a button, and the fact that we have no financial incentive whatsoever to keep the newest and best payment innovation away from you, we've never been better positioned to take our customers into the future.

We can't wait to see what comes next.

We believe our biggest advantage as a company is that we can better empathize with people who own yoga studios, and that because of this, we are able to provide them with superior technology that can help their businesses succeed.

Since we launched almost three years ago, with the first students checked into Maile's studio using our software, we have gone out of our way to provide the kind of experience we think is right not just for our customers with our software, but also the kind of experience that students of yoga studios want to have with the studios that they go to.

We do not think marketplace apps that help people find studios around them based on their location are the kinds of things yoga studios need to help their businesses succeed. We believe these serve no other purpose than to help turn yoga into a commodity and mis-understand the unique place that yoga studios play in the lives of their students.

Instead, we believe yoga studios would benefit more by having their own place on the home screens of the phones of their students, so that the communities they build can feel more connected directly to them.

Today we are thrilled to announce that with Tula, you and your studio can have a presence in the world's most important online store, Apple's App Store. Complete with your logo, your studio colors and your custom loading page, your studio can have an application in the app store by being on the $99/mo plan, and paying a one time setup fee of $500. It's eventually going to be $750 but we're having an introductory price of $500 for a couple weeks.

It's that easy. No hourly rate, no design fee, no extra service fee.

Along with this announcement, we're also announcing the release of Student Access on iOS, which is available via an updated Tula Software iPhone app which is available for download right now in the app store.

It comes at no additional charge for all Tula subscribers and the students they serve.

This means you have two choices for allowing your students to view your schedule, register for class, store their credit cards and make purchases via a native iPhone app.

Option 1: A free application, that has the Tula Software logo and branding, or Option 2: a more premium option that provides all the functionality of the Tula application, but branded for your studio.

We're so excited about this announcement, and thrilled that as Apple gets ready to announce their next generation of devices and services, our customers can count on us to help navigate them into the technological future, wherever that may take us.

If you're an existing customer of Tula, you can sign up for this service by simply logging in and going to 'Studio Settings' -> 'iOS Apps'. If you're not a Tula customer but this sounds like the kind of thing you think your business deserves, you can send us an email at 'hello@tulasoftware.com'.

Below are some screenshots of the Tula iPhone app with the student experience, along with the branded version of Tula Yoga Studio next to it, to help give you a feel for the different options.

Very lastly, if you're a developer interested in access to the data inside Tula, information about an API will be coming out in the future as a result of these efforts. We plan to embrace anyone that wants to build products and services for the growing base of Tula's customers.

Check out just a handful of screenshots below to see how the custom app might look with your studio's brand!